2025 has been the eternal year hasn’t it? And the fact it is both already October and only October should tell you quite a bit about just how long this year has felt. Due to… reasons, I’ve dealt a lot with feelings of hopelessness and helplessness. Lack of stable work makes things incredibly stressful, utter exhaustion and insomnia combine to make me irritable and while I have written quite a bit thus far in the year I still can’t help but just feel drained. My creative spark at times has felt like a fizzle, and it’s hard to even conceive of getting through my homework some weeks.

Hope has often been the thing that keeps me holding on. A spark of a thread that somehow some way, things HAVE to get better.

It’s not an easy thing, hope. It often feels ephemeral. Just on the periphery of our lives, like something we can see in the distance, the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, but not quite fully. Perhaps it’s like the sunrise in the wee morning hours, you can’t look directly at it, but you know it’s there. You can feel it. I am someone who (more often than not) despite what has felt like years of feeling utterly drained emotionally and mentally particularly where my career is concerned, I remain ever hopeful. Ever the optimist.

In some ways, I feel like I have to.

Whereas my younger self was perhaps more of a pragmatist, I find that sort of thing frustrating now. I find the many many doomsayers frustrating at best. Because why else would you keep going if not hope for a brighter tomorrow? Why would you not simply crawl into bed and pull the covers over your head and give up trying anything new or interesting at all if not due to some hope that it will mean something or lead to something somewhere?

Hopelessness is easy, believing that the battle for a better tomorrow is lost, it may not feel easy but compared to the emotional clawing through glass that can be keeping up hope despite the horrors I would say it’s far easier to simply give into the hopeless.

But I don’t think you should.

Because the truth is no one knows what tomorrow will bring. We try to look to history to make sense of the present and try to predict the future but history can only tell us so much. Can only predict so much. Only we with the actions we take right now, and the hope we put forth into the future right now have any hope of actually creating a better future. Believing that it’s possible, believing that a better future is attainable and a worthwhile thing to strive for is the first step. Then making the effort is the next one.

I know better than most it isn’t easy. Some days are going to be harder than others. Some days are going to feel impossible, and rest is necessary on those days. But it is also important, while you are resting to remember that the future is never set in stone. Nothing is unequivocally certain.

Better days are coming. A brighter tomorrow, one that you can feel happy about one that you can breathe in, one that doesn’t feel like a constant and unending slog of exhaustion and nightmares is coming. It is possible. But we all have to have radical hope that it can be. Not just for ourselves but for everyone.

Hopelessness is easy. But it’s not the ideal.